Sergio De La Pava - Personae

2 A giant boulder rolling down a hill will appear menacing and as if nothing can stop it. But if an equal or greater rock comes along only one of them can occupy a given space at a given time.

3 And this is true as well of these people in this place at this time. That they cannot coexist together in harmony but rather that one must instead destroy the other.

4 So this Man walks to where they are. He walks barefoot, guided by the sun, his right arm ending in a blade and swinging like a pendulum. He walks through living then dead vegetation and he knows the destruction he carries there will be terrible and swift.

* * *

IN the time before this he had been one of the first to bring water to his village. Back then un pueblo was just another way of saying a collection of people congregated near a river. The necessity of water and mankind’s inability to provide it mechanically and widely left vast expanses of Colombian earth free of human activity.

2 The first insight was wells. A process in truth well known to even that collection of people but remember that even the greatest knowledge must defer to spirited action. He took action.

3 He dragged others with him, some coming almost involuntarily, others unable to resist the magnetic pull of his will paired with his frightening physical strength, and in unison they worked. Armed with no machine greater than the human body, they dug. They dug and soil was displaced and water rose in response and when quickly thereafter his dissatisfaction with this new convenience rose they formed irrigatory canals that ultimately gave every home in the village its own private store of the freshest almost to the point of invisibility water the world had seen to that point.

4 And during this time it was true that probably the most complex thought that arose in his mind as he afflicted his body with the harshest possible abuse was that he wanted water so the globe must yield it to him.

* * *

WE’RE going to go ahead and call this the heyday of the New York City coffee shop only without doing anything coarse like resorting to statistics or dates. This was way before the country started scrutinizing its coffee so the default result was an abysmal tan liquid that did honor to no one. His idea was to play up his Colombian heritage (even his wildly-uneducated-in-these-matters clientele understood vaguely what that word meant with respect to coffee) to confer the shine of expertise on his new shop. But this was no mere marketing gambit as he ground the beans himself (unheard of then) and those beans (only dark-roasted to avoid sowing unnecessary confusion) came exclusively from Colombia. The result was uncommon artistry, especially in the nascent espresso field.

2 Aside from the coffee the rest of the shop was paradigmatic. Waist-high metal columns rose from the floor near an impermeable countertop to end in fully rotatable and cushioned circles. Translucent plastic top hats covered exorbitant slices of pound cake and giant perilously stacked nuts comprised of dough.

3 Most of all a place like this tends to collect familiar faces in usual spots. The faces don’t start familiar but repetition makes them so. The repetition is due to this: lonely people, even ones who wouldn’t self-identify as such, can long to hear other people and interact with them regardless of the level of that interaction.

4 Back then wasn’t like now. Television had maybe four legitimate channels. You couldn’t as skillfully simulate company, and Silence, despite its far greater incidence, had a more powerful potential to sting.

5 His coffee shop, with its lack of any repelling pretense coupled with a genuine palpable warmth, seemed to draw a disproportionately high number of these people. Over time it drew him more and more as well so that he often ignored more pressing matters at one of his other business concerns in favor of a newspaper, his corner booth, and an occasional cursory glance at receipts.

6 And during one of these times he stepped behind the cash register to strike its typewriter-type keys and watched generally then intently as Marybeth entered the shop for the first time, sat on its most isolated stool, and wondered aloud what was supposed to make Colombian coffee so great anyway.

* * *

THE trail of dead is long but Man must follow it to its bloodiest point. He knows the deranged mind of the rebel and how it explains the ghastly discards he keeps encountering as he tracks them in pursuit.

2 The rebels will take everyone like they did here but as they retreat into the jungle like suddenly-lit vermin they will deem some of their civilian captives not worth the effort needed to remain their captors and those bodies will litter the ground like routine road markers.

3 He has violated his own rule and taken a pair of shoes from one of the bodies. They cover his feet and soon become red from his blood but with their protection he now moves twice as fast.

4 That means he comes upon the bodies twice as fast as well and each time his breathing tightens intolerably until he can be sure the body is not a woman or a girl.

5 This is a woman but not his. Her neck vivisected by a wide red smile. Esta es la diferencia con estos malparidos , he thought. The difference is that while true that he was a man of violent sin he knew this and it often made him sad. He didn’t revel in it.

6 The rebels represent a new iteration of human evil. There is nothing to them beyond it. No boundaries either, nothing they respect. On the contrary they seem to delight in a pointed inversion of a long-established moral taxonomy that protected groups like clergy, women, children. Anything that sought to create order out of entropic chaos was suddenly attractive target.

7 So they could march into a church on a Sunday morning, leave substantial dead including many of the above, and exit with a kidnapped congregation.

8 He has trouble understanding this.

9 But they will not be getting him in a confused or conflicted state. He is going to give them the only thing they understand, savage destruction, and even alone he is excessively capable. There will be no deliberative caution either. He has yet to see a female rebel so women are safe; otherwise anybody crossing his path is going to be blotted from existence and let God sort them out afterwards. He steps over the latest body and continues.

* * *

BIRTH is less the opposite of death than it is its cleverest symbol.

2 For the seven months they knew what was coming he wanted nothing more than a daughter. He followed all the wildly unscientific procedures required. At his insistence, they chose only a girl’s name. But when the moment actually approached he wanted only that his wife should survive what was imminent, the concept of a child no longer existed.

3 The desire to be responsible for adding to the world only a female made perfect sense to him. Women, all of them, were beautiful. Every woman and all of that woman.

4 He’d often looked at a woman’s hands for example and been amazed. The same structure that in him and others exuded such brutality quickened his blood in excitement when on a woman.

5 Beyond that, the physical, was the capacity of their souls.

6 His woman’s screams filled the same house his father had decades earlier built for his birth and all he could think to do was bring and heat water. The midwife had helped birth half the village by then and she gave him orders more to keep him busy than out of any genuine need.

7 The moment, when it came, was more terrible than he’d even imagined and the preceding hours had given rise to some truly gruesome imaginings. The very real possibility back then that new life would cause death created an almost visible aura of potential horror. The screams of his woman intensified until they were indistinguishable from those heard on a descent into Hell. Also the violent emergence of a bloodied human form was not miraculous. For him it had become incidental to the larger insight she brought: our entry, like our death, must be violent to befit a strenuously combated interruption of Nothingness.